Television

Saturday, July 29, 2017

Police contact with the elderly on the rise, here are some horrible interactions

As a result, older people and law enforcement officers are
crossing paths more frequently, recent data suggests — sometimes with terrible
consequences, reported the New York Times.

Consider arrest rates. From 2002 to 2012, the rate fell by
11 percent among those ages 18 to 64, according to federal data analyzed by
researchers at the University of California, San Francisco.

But the arrest rate rose by 23 percent for people over 55.
It rose even more markedly — by 28 percent — among those over 65, more than
106,000 of whom were arrested in 2012, the last year for which statistics are
available.

“These contacts are occurring more frequently,” said Dr.
Brie Williams, a geriatrician and director of the university’s Criminal Justice
Aging Project.

Arrests constitute only one measure of involvement, of
course. The police are asked to find people with dementia who wander and to
bring them home. They stop in for safety checks when family or doctors worry
about elders’ welfare.

Especially when people have dementia, “they may be
disrupting a neighborhood or engaging aggressively with someone they don’t
know, and the police end up being called,” Dr. Williams said. Nursing home
staff members, too, may call 911 when they feel unable to handle belligerent
patients.

Here are some horrible interactions between the elderly and law
enforcement:

At a residence for older adults in San Francisco last
summer, Carol King momentarily left a common sitting area. When Ms. King
returned, she found that another resident had taken her chair, a nurse who
witnessed the episode later reported. She grabbed the usurper’s wrist.

Though staff members intervened promptly and nobody appeared
injured, the other resident (who also had dementia) called 911 to say she had
been attacked. Soon, Ms. King’s son, Geoffrey, was summoned and four police
officers arrived.

Over objections from staff members and her son, the officers
decided to place Ms. King on an involuntary psychiatric hold, which allows a
72-hour detention when an officer believes someone is unable to care for
herself or poses a danger to herself or others.

As they searched and handcuffed Ms. King and placed her in a
patrol car, “she started crying,” Mr. King recalled.

At the Psychiatric Emergency Services department at San
Francisco General Hospital, a psychiatrist found Ms. King “calm and
cooperative,” showing no evidence of psychiatric illness, and released her
after seven hours after she was detained.

■ After a 65-year-old in San Jose, Calif., was arrested and
charged with trespassing, a judge — informed that the man had Alzheimer’s —
dismissed the charge. But deputies at the jail released him before a friend
arrived to pick him up, and he wandered onto a highway, was
hit by a car and killed.

■ In Bakersfield, Calif., a 73-year-old man with dementia
was walking in his neighborhood late at night when a woman he approached
noticed something in his pocket that she thought might have been a gun. When
the police arrived and told him to raise his hands, he ignored their shouts,
walked toward them and was shot and killed. The object in his pocket proved
to bea
crucifix.

About Matt

An analysis of crime and punishment from the perspective of a former prosecutor and current criminal justice practitioner.
The views expressed on this blog are solely those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or postions of any county, state or federal agency.